Le Corbusier

Le Corbusier posters: the architect who painted

Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, known as Le Corbusier (1887–1965), is remembered for buildings — Ronchamp, the Unité d'habitation, Chandigarh — and for a proportion system he called the Modulor, built on the measurements of the human body. Less known is that he painted every morning for decades, and that his paintings, with their stacked figures, hands and totems, are the source of much of what he built.

What is in this collection

• The Modulor — the Modulor poster shows the grid of proportions he used to size rooms, windows and furniture. It is a working drawing as much as a picture.
• The paintings — Mains croisées sur la tête, Petite Confidences, Totem, Main et Silex and the abstract print: hands, stones and figures drawn with a heavy outline against flat colour.
• Exhibition posters — the 1953 exhibition and the 1956 Lyon festival poster.

How to choose one

The Modulor is the one for a study or an office: it reads as a diagram, and people stop in front of it. The figure paintings are warmer and work in a living room, especially in a flat with concrete, white walls or mid-century furniture. The exhibition posters suit a hallway.

Le Corbusier sits naturally next to the Bauhaus posters — two versions of the same argument about proportion and industry — and next to Kandinsky, who was working on the same questions about form at the same time.

Sizes, paper and delivery

Every poster is printed on Hahnemühle paper and is available in sizes from 30×40 to 70×100 cm, plus A3 and A2. Orders leave the studio within 24 business hours, delivery in the EU takes 3–5 working days (3–6 outside the EU), and every parcel is tracked.

Why an architect's poster belongs on a wall

Architecture is the one art you cannot hang. A poster is the closest thing: it carries the drawing, the grid and the colour of a building you will probably never own, at a size that fits above a desk.

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